Omid's Blog

Movin' On Up

2006-05-29T21:23:00.000+01:00

Or to the left, or right. Definitely not down.

Let's just put it this way: I am, in a tri-directional way, ascending the ladder of web omnipotence.

You can find my new blog here: http://omid.timetorant.com

(Ta for the domain Gary!)

I'll be investing in a top-level domain name soon, and I'll keep you fully posted on any developments on the new site.

Blogger's been fun - and if my 'sources' are to believed, I've developed quite a following (albiet one of people who read but don't comment, but hey, who's complaining? (Me.)).

Anyway, I refused to let go completely, so all the old Blogger posts (this one not included) have been imported into my spankin' new WordPress account. Funky.

Omid

The Gangsta Shizzle

2006-05-24T22:14:00.000+01:00

Music, just like excrement, is shit.

The reason for this somewhat sweeping, and, admittedly, fundamentally incorrect, generalisation is all because of the invasion of American ‘gangstaz’ who rap about ‘getting down wit dair hos, fo sho’.

I don’t envisage this being a particularly long entry; my opinions on hip-hop, rap, and whatever other pathetic excuses for genres that consist of either some burly black guy shouting about ‘his niggas and bitches, muthafucka’ while telling me to ‘shake dat ass’, or electronically-engineered ten-minute long headache-inducing ‘songs’ whose constituent parts are a “duhh duhh duhh” sound in the background, and a voiceover orchestrated by Pinky and Perky, are forever set in stone.

As you can probably guess, I don’t take too kindly to this sort of ‘music’; the main perpetrators are people like 50 Cent and Peepee Diddly (or whatever he’s called this week).

The former of the two was apparently shot nine times. Unfortunately, he lived to tell the tale, and make a video game whose main theme is, yep, shooting people.

Moving on…

It really is incredibly just how alike all these acts sound. There are, in my humble (but inevitably correct) opinion, two types of rap-hop (or whatever) – these are explained below.

The first is the “I’m going to shoot you and proceed to engage in sexual intercourse with prostitutes (pop a cap in yo’ ass den fuck ma ho’s)”. The videos for these particular types will obviously contain three main things (aside from the pimpin’ frontman himself, who will be clad in a white fur coat, have a cornrow hair-do, wear shades, fondle his cock all the time, and randomly shout “word” whilst making strange symbols with his fingers), which you should look out for if ever you’re unlucky enough to see one.

These are: 1) Semi-naked women waggling their arses, 2) “Brothas” in the background, usually saying, “Uh, yeah”, “Fo sho”, or “Shizzle ma bizzle, biatch”. And, 3) Of course, lots of gold chains, a white limousine, possibly a Jacuzzi, and various other materials with which the pimp goes about his business.

Getting back to my original point, the second type of video is traditionally performed by 19-year old ‘brothaz from da hood’ who consider themselves philosophers. This type will almost always contain the words “I’m sorry”, or “I want you back” or “I didn’t mean to sleep with her, my cock just fell out of my pants and then I fucked her”, in the title. They tend to document some poor hoodie-clad chap who’s lost his girlfriend because he slept with another woman. Or, as is more than likely the case, a whore.

Alternatively, he could have moved away from the area and be trying to use the song to express his undying love.

Wow, you’re really quite good at detecting bullshit.

Back to the subject at hand – this second type of song is usually accompanied by a video that, while substantially different from the other type, still follows a formula. This time, however, it’ll be something like the following:

Boy is seen leaving bar. Boy walks home through rain, hood-up and will be either a) making strange signs with his hands, b) keeping his hands in his pockets, or c) a bit of both.

He then goes home, and sits on his bed. Cut to girlfriend/ ex-girlfriend, who will probably look at a picture of the two of them together and start crying. The boy will then pick up a random object and throw it against a wall, clearly thinking that this will, in some way, aid his situation.

It’ll carry on in much this way, with the boy occasionally meeting up with ‘his brothas (from da hood, of course)’.

All in all, it’s a bag of shite. The videos for dance/ trance/ whatever, while I’ve never actually seen one, (probably because they don’t exist, as the songs are intended to be listened to by e’d up clubbers on a Friday night in Liverpool), will by definition be equally as bad. If the adverts for “God’s Bathroom Classics” are anything to go by, then they’ll simply consist of a few bikini-clad women dancing in front of an epileptic-fit inducing background.

Before I leave the topic, I’d like to go back to an aforementioned point – cock-fondling. Maybe this could help.

And one final point. I mentioned at the start that my 'sweeping generalisation' was 'fundamentally incorrect'. Indeed it is, there's a world of good music out there. People just need to wake up to it.

White Kids Acting They’re Black

If you listen to the Libertines, you’ll know where I drew the inspiration for that sub-title from. (And even if you don’t, you do now because I just told you).

Anyway. Tim Westwood. What. The. Fuck. Never in my life have I encountered (albeit on a TV) a more arrogant, cringe-worthy human being. Seriously, who does he think he’s kidding? Not I, my friend; for all his “bling bling”, “you da man” and episodes of Pimp My Ride UK, it really is quite easy to see through the homie-veneer to the small, spoilt mummy’s boy who goes round to his granny’s every Sunday for a roast dinner and a chocolate biscuit. “Big dawg” my arse.

Well, somewhere up the page I said I couldn’t see this becoming a long entry, but evidently I was talking rubbish because I’m writing this in Word (fitting, no?) and I’m almost on three pages at size ten Verdana.

So, I shall leave you with this humorous factoid:

“50 cent used to be known as Dollar. Then he met Mr. T”.

P.S. Yes, I really did listen to the Manics 289 times in the last week. So there.

Big Mutha [expletive removed]

2006-05-22T22:49:00.000+01:00

Or, “Orwell would be turning in his grave”.

And with good reason too. The 12 social rejects they’ve rounded up this time seem even more mentally backwards, to say the least, than ever. They possess the conversational skills of a group of toddlers, and clearly have absolutely no shame. At all.

Let’s have a look at the housemates, shall we?

Bonnie. Apparently she has a penchant for fiddling with herself in public. She claims to be a care worker, which mean’s she works in a nursery half-heartedly giving screaming children bottles of milk and yelling at them to, “shat the fack up” while she tries to talk to Britney on her mobile.

Dawn. She looks dead (that is, dead. Passed away. Snuffed it) in her picture on the C4 website. Evidently she has little in the way of a life, as she spends her time reading textbooks and claims to be an exercise scientist (though this obviously means she just goes running quite a lot).

George. “He describes himself as stubborn, posh, and comical”. Quite how a stubborn, posh person could be comical eludes me, but there you go. Apparently he’s married to the queen or something.

Glyn. He boasts not only a weird name, but also a very strange face and is ridiculously arrogant. Good for him. He says he hates animals, which is paradoxical because by definition he therefore hates himself, yet claims to be wonderful. Right, then…

Grace. She appears to be being asphyxiated in the picture of her on the C4 website. She says she lives on her own, which literally translates as, “I’m a whore”.

Imogen. C4 claim she’s ‘sexy and edgy’. According to her ‘personal data’ she’s a bar hostess, which quite clearly means she’s a stripper. She also claims to have brains, but doesn’t like jokes because ‘she doesn’t get them’. I see.

Lea. I had to double check to make sure this one was actually a human before I started writing about her/ it. She says she’s a model, though Plastic Surgery Weekly is the only magazine I could possibly imagine her ever appearing in. Seriously, there’s sexy, and then there’s just plain wrong.

Lisa. A Chinese/ Mancunian chav who would appear to have no neck, and, according to her picture on C4’s site, claims to be “wild, crazy and sexy”. That is, until you actually see the picture, or hear her talk. Then she could be summed up as just “annoying”.

Mikey. He says he’s a software developer. What’s this? My god! Someone with a hint of intellect! Maybe so, but it’s somewhat wasted – he’s also a model, and his ‘party piece’ is using his mouth as a bottle opener. [Edit - thinking about it, 'software developer' probably means he thinks he has 'teh ubar hmtl skillz0rs'.]

Nikki. Described as a “wannabe footballer’s wife”, which essentially means she enjoys being screwed by chavs. She says she’s a model/ dancer – I think you can see where this is going.

Pete. He has Tourette’s. I’m all for equality, but really, you have to pity the guy – he’s being put on TV in front of god-knows how many million uneducated people who haven’t even heard of his condition and are just going to get a laugh out of watching him shout “tits” randomly.

Richard. There’s always one isn’t there? He’s gay, (it’s even more obvious than Dale “I want you to bust my colon” Winton), fancies Vin Diesel, and his utopian ideal is being sent to prison. Each to his own, ‘n’ all that, but really, why the hell would anyone, gay or not, want to be bummed by a fat, hairy, sweaty convict who’ll make you drop your soap and then shout, “You’d better bend over and pick that up”.

Sezer. Says he ‘hates politics and Tony Blair’; these two claims, however, are quite obviously mutually exclusive. If he hates politics, then he’ll have no interest in it, and thus he’ll know bugger all about Mr Blair. He’s also shaved half of one his eyebrows off, wears a gold chain, likes women, and used to be a boxer. Oh, and he says the three words he’d use to describe himself are “made of platinum”. Nope, they don’t come much thicker.

Shahbaz. He’s the as-required-in-order-for-the-show-to-be-politically-correct homosexual Asian dude. I’m only guessing he’s gay, but he likes knitting and Kylie Minogue, and calls himself a party animal. Obvious, no?

Well, there you go. Twelve more deluded hopefuls blindly seeking fame, which, for however the long show is on for, will be partially true. Then it’ll end, two or three will sell their stories to The Sun, buy a car or something, shag a TV presenter, and then fade into obscurity like everyone else.

If you want an entertaining take on Reality TV, read Dead Famous by Ben Elton.

G’night.

The End of an Era

2006-05-20T22:21:00.000+01:00

Before I start (the first person to say I already have gets a slap), you’ll have to forgive me two small sins. First, the title of this entry is the literary clichéd equivalent of Linda Barker; if you don’t understand that, then don’t feel stupid – it took me about 5 minutes to decide on the structure on that sentence and even now I’m fully aware of the fact that it makes little to no sense.

My second apology is for the simple fact that the era in question, while it may be part-ended, is far from completely over. Perplexed? I thought not, but read on anyway – it’s more fun that whatever you were doing before you started reading (unless you were having sex, in which case, I retract my last statement. (Although, having said that, people have been known to compare the levels of excitement obtained from my blog to sex… *shot*)).

Anyway, now that I’ve got that neurological ejaculation of unnecessary bullshit out of the way, I’ll get on with what I actually started writing this entry for: the last day of school (sort of).

If you read the last paragraph (which I’m humbly assuming you did), you’ll be blessed with the knowledge that, at some point in the last week, school’s last day (sort of) threw itself upon me (and the rest of my year). And, surprisingly enough, you’d be right. The reason for the “sort of”, and also the explanation for my second apology earlier on, is that, while official, structured lessons might have finished, we still have to go in for revision classes and exams. What fun.

So, then, I've now wasted a somewhat substantial amount of your time raving about what I’m going to be talking about but avoiding actually talking about it, (see, I’m still doing it now and YOU are still falling for it!), and I have, needless to say, accomplished very little in the way of informative literature.

Ok, ok, ok. I’ll get to the point – the last day (sort of) of school. The first three lessons (apart from science, wherein 100+ students were crammed into two science labs for something of a ‘party’ (ok, it wasn’t that bad, we got free custard creams!)), took place as per usual. The afternoon, however, was a different affair entirely, as we all sat down in the hall to watch the leaver’s assembly.

This was orchestrated by the deputy head, who began with a slideshow of pictures of us from pre-Y11. Then, about half way through the presentation, the pièce de résistance – 4 manipulated photos of one unlucky person (Jack Bell, for future reference), in the form of “Ping-pong Jacky”, “Jacky Potter”, “Professor Jack” and another one which I’ve forgotten, created by me and Ashley (http://esurfers.co.uk).

The slideshow then moved on, and the final slide contained a masterpiece started by Ashley and finished by moi – a collage of photoswaps. Cartoon characters and TV icons mixed with the heads of people from school. It was greeted with something along the lines of hushed laughter, whatever that is. I presume this was because people were trying to find out who they’d been given the body of, (and well they might, certain manipulations included a tech teacher as the pope, Ashley as an orange body builder, and Jack (yep, him again) as Bender. It should also be noted that the maths teacher’s head was placed on the body of a Fimble, and, head tilted and arms outstretched, was positioned in such a way as she appeared to be checking out Jack’s crotch).

Following the presentation, people began to do their own acts. They were all rather good, and Emily, Heather and Olivia (who I’ve mentioned in another entry) performed a song.

Inevitably, as the assembly drew to a close, people began to cry. It was all very sad and emotional, and, while I managed to refrain from ‘shedding a tear’, writing about it would probably be considered voyeurism, so I’ll do an Eastenders and ‘leave it aaht’.

Moving on.

After the assembly, we (that is, a group of about 15 of us), relocated to the drama studio to eat cake. Me, Emily, and a few others turned up first, just in time to be met by a chavette of unprecedented scallyness, who, through tar-clogged vocal chords, asked me if I was gay. She then proceeded to ask us all if we had 50p to get a drink, and after we’d all replied negatively, she took a chocolate finger out of the cake and legged it.

Shortly afterwards, Megan (there you go, you got into my blog!), Ellie (and you!), and some others arrived. Then, like halitosis, the chav girl returned and was promptly told to fuck off by the aforementioned girls, before attempting to wrestle with Kathryn, who ‘took it outside’.

Either way, we all (finally) got round to eating the cake, which was, it has to be said, not only ridiculously tasty, but also amazingly crafted (it was shaped into ‘that car’ from Grease).

After I’d devoured more than my fair share, and we’d all lain about on the drama studio floor for a while, we went outside to play Frisbee. As time went on, Megan felt the need to take her bra off, in the middle of the field, and wear it outside her t-shirt, apparently because, “It’s painful”.

I then realised it was time to go, so me, Megan and Ellie walked back to art to get my stuff, and then on to the car park. I don’t whether to laugh or cry about the fact that my mum’s first encounter with Miss Griffiths involved certain pieces of lingerie being worn outside her clothes. Ah well…

Alton Towers

I had planned an entry for this based around the following thought, “I’m at home, while everyone is out doing whatever it is people do at Alton Towers (vomiting on to the people in front of them on Oblivion)”. However, creativity and inspiration began to wane exponentially from then on, so I decided against it.

However, it definitely deserves writing about, so here goes. As you may have gathered, yesterday saw pretty much everyone in my year (not me, though), go to Alton Towers. I didn’t go because a) it was too expensive, and b) the thought of having my face forcibly ripped from my skull and plastered onto a headrest while going three million miles an hour down a straight vertical drop doesn't really set my balls on fire.

Despite the looming death, it was a pity I didn't go, as it would have given me an opportunity to fulfil the ongoing joke between me and Ashley (or “Ushy” as the retarded Y9’s call him), of “coming on Rita” (albeit in a decidedly morbid manner that would require several people with spatulas to clear up). Childish though it may be, it saved many a science lesson from becoming a pit of dullness (quite a task, actually).

Onwards and Upwards

So, then, where do I go from here? After my GCSE’s, I’m heading off to Marple 6th Form to do Computing, Applied ICT (easy A-level), English Language, and Psychology. The last, though, apparently, isn’t very good, so I’m considering History instead.

I’ve sat here for five minutes thinking of a witty ending, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it just ain’t gonna happen. So, I’ll bid thee farewell. (Actually, I won’t, I’ll just say bye).

Bye.

Pizza Shut (The Fuck Up)

2006-05-12T23:52:00.000+01:00

If three different adverts for the same food chain are advertised one-hundred times a day on seventeen different channels, how long does it take before one cynical teenager becomes so annoyed he feels compelled to write a blog entry about it?

The answer? Ooh, about ten minutes.

The more astute among you (i.e. those who can read), will have noticed that, in my last entry into this electronic home of witty cynicism and general contemporary pessimism (lots of isms there), I wrote about the Coca-Cola advert which is more annoying than being tied to a chair, having your eyelids held open with lollipop sticks and being forced to watch old Madonna videos.

Today(night)’s entry is once again, as you may have guessed from the opening paragraph, about adverts.

Pizza Hut recently came up with what is apparently an incredibly witty take on an old phrase, in the form of, “You do the maths, we’ll do the pizza”. Clearly this is just something that a bored marketing arsehole thought was clever, and who, in his (or her) moment of euphoria at being awarded another slice of pizza at the Pizza Hut HQ lunch, overlooked the rather glaringly obvious fact that mathematics has bugger all to do with the consumption of circular bread-based foodstuffs.

Not just this, but also the fact that the adverts themselves, once you’ve seen them once, are about as likely to make you want to go and buy a pizza as watching a cow getting skinned alive is going to make you want to buy a real leather sofa (possibly from DFS – home of the eternal half-price sale?)

There are (as far I know) three of said adverts. The first one features a family, fingers of some sort, and a waitress who deems it necessary to look smug and carry the tray above her head.

The second involves two families who play tennis. They're clearly all middle-class Tories, so that pretty much rules out that advert having any effect on me (apart from maybe kicking the TV in).

The third, and the one which prompted me to write this entry, is about a couple (Yvonne and John, we are reliably informed) who buy some pizza. Apparently, Yvonne has some new rollerskates, and poor old John has the box, and subsequently, Yvonne ‘treats’ John to some kind of pizza meal-deal, and allegedly “goes up three times on eight wheels”. Following the insertion of said pizza into said couples’ respective digestive openings (that is, their mouth, not their arse); we are asked some stupid question about submarining.

So, not only are Pizza Hut clearly stating, in a very visual way, that they don’t mind if you come round to one of their outlets and roll around on flashing rollerskates while wielding pizzas above your head (and breaking a few H&S laws while you’re at it), but they quite obviously don’t respect their customers time as they just wasted a precious 45 seconds of my life with some crappy advert which culminated in me being asked how often two social rejects like to dress up as sailors and go submarining.

Is it just me, or are adverts just shit? I want to go back to the good ol’ days of Honda’s “Cog”. That is a true piece of commercial genius.

I fucked God up the ass

2006-05-08T19:59:00.000+01:00

Earlier today, in the midst of a frankly hilarious conversation with Gary (‘Nirvana’ on black0ps), I said I was going to blog about something. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten what that was, and Windows Live Messenger has a habit of blatantly lying when it says it has the ability to make contact logs – they all come up blanker than a very black thing in the middle of Antarctica. So, while he finds that, I’ll talk about something else.

Infact, there’s a few things I’ve been ‘savouring’, so to speak.

Why do Tesco insist on using superglue on their toilet rolls? It’s not a nice experience when, trousers at ankle level, sat on the toilet, you have to rip off half the roll to get it started. Then, of course, you either end up ripping it and pulling off sheets at half-width, or the two layers separate and thus you have to pull off the desired length twice, then attempt to reunite the two layers in lavatorial communion before committing them to do their job.

The new ‘put the lime in the coke you nut’ advert. If you haven’t seen it, then please, allow me to explain. (Readers of a nervous disposition are strongly advised to scroll down).

It starts with a scene in the coke factory, and man (hereafter known as ‘Man A’) happens to be holding a lime in one hand and a bottle of coke in the other. Quite why he has the lime remains a mystery. Seconds later, two thought bubbles emerge from his ears, containing pictures of the items he’s holding, as if to reinforce the fact that – yes – this is a lime, and this is a bottle of coke.

Evidently, some tiny spark of inventiveness is triggered inside the man’s head, and he runs off to his boss (Man B) who, upon the arrival of Man A, shouts, with a raised eyebrow and a rather disturbing paedophilic smirk, “Now let me get this straight”, without even being told what the idea he is attempting to de-wrinkle is. This is also quite ironic because Man B is quite clearly a closet homosexual.

The advert then leaves the alphabetically-monickered individuals and cuts to inside the coke factory again, and we see a balding conveyer-belt operator trying to demonstrate how get the lime into a coke bottle to a minion who clearly cannot comprehend the thought of lime-flavoured liquid, I imagine he is probably thinking, “Mmm, hamburgers.”

The next thing we see is a convoy of coca-cola trucks leaving the factory, and, seconds later, a news reporter takes a swig of the amazing new drink and exclaims in rabid fascination, “Wow! This is coke – with lime”, just in case we hadn’t yet figured that out. The closing shot is of a picture of the lime-flavoured coke, or ‘come’ as I like to call it.

It looks just like normal coke, exect for the glaringly off-putting fact that it’s bright green. This leads me to conclude that it is, infact, toxic waste and should be avoided at all costs. There’s also a scene with a tractor in, but I wasn’t sad enough to memorise the entire advert – just parts of it.

There was definitely some other stuff, but I can’t remember what it was, and besides, Gary’s found the topic I was meant to be writing about.

The Gate is Open

...is the new slogan for Bulldog Broadband. Let’s rewind:

Some of you may be aware of a company called Bulldog. They do broadband, which, until recently, was available at a maximum connection speed of 8 – yes, 8 Mbps. Now, presumably because of the employment of over 5,000,000 new hamsters, gerbils and other assorted rodents (used primarily to generate such high connection speeds, but also as attackers to nibble through the cables of opposing ISPs), they are offering speeds at double their previous maximum – 16Mbps. For just £14.99 a month.

Sounds great, does it not? Well, yes, but anyone with even a vague trace of common sense will instinctively know there must be a catch. And, of course, there is. A rather large one; a 1Gb cap. So, you’ll be happily downloading at 16Mbps, and suddenly you’ll run out of bandwidth and presumably start paying absurdly high rates for every megabyte you download from then on.

This, however, is circumnavigational..able..whatever. Bulldog offers a £24.99 version of its 16meg broadband which removes the 1gig cap and lets you download as much as you want.

There is still one tiny problem though. The fine print kindly points out that the connection speed is subject to availability, line strength, quality, location, how many kids you have and what colour underwear you’ve got on. As you may have guessed, I made the last two up, but nonetheless the point remains – there’re probably about three people in the whole of the UK who can get the maximum connection speed.

If you go here, you can check whether or not your household is capable of receiving the steroid-enhanced connection. It would appear that most BT lines operate at a maximum of 2.2Mbps.

Yes, the gate may well be open, but only if you live in the field. And, yes, that analogy was shite, but you know what I mean.

Now, Gary, I believe we were discussing laying our own phone lines for ‘teh oobar aye-ess-pee”?

Oh, yes, the title – taken from the song ‘Patrick Bateman’ by the Manics. Obviously, it has absolutely no relevance to this entry, it just sounds controversial, and controversial is good.

Always Never

2006-04-27T22:55:00.000+01:00

I did it - I got through the week with my sanity. Just.

The past four days (we get tomorrow off), have been hell, and as a result, I have a lot of things to complain about. First and foremost though, this:

Corel Draw is utterly, utterly shit.

If you haven’t heard of Corel Draw, it’s supposed to be an ‘industry leading’, ‘easy to use’ graphics program. Bollocks. Never in my life have I come across such a fussy, annoying and generally fucked-up program as this. From little things like the page flying miles out of view when you scroll with the scrollbar, to big things like it not displaying colours correctly. Really, would you use a piece of software that has a warning on it that the colours it displays ‘might not match PANTONE [http://www.pantone.com] identified standards’? No, I didn’t think so. So why then, am I forced to use it for my GCSE graphics coursework?

If you’re hungering for more reasons as to why it simply epitomises shite, then here’s a few for you.

Firstly, you have to play a game of electronic roulette when you try and start it – sometimes it freezes, other times it says ‘product installation unsuccessful’. When (if) it does start (that’s not necessarily a good thing, mind you), you’re presented with a seemingly user-friendly program. That is, of course, until you start to use it. You want to rotate something ninety degrees? No, you can’t have a keyboard shortcut; instead you have to open a panel on the right hand side, enter your value, and then hit ‘apply’.

Second, if you want to add a new layer, then you have to open the ‘object manager’ (which is a miserable attempt at a layer manager). Then, you have to right-click around randomly (or on a miniscule button in the right hand corner) until you get a context menu which offers you the option of adding a new layer. Obviously, if you want to hide or lock a single object, you have to give it its own layer, as you can only hide or lock layers, not individual objects.

For the third trip to the slaughterhouse, we’re going back to the colours. I’m being serious here, the red is orange, the blue is purple, and there’s some random colours thrown in for good measure, such as ‘storm blue’, which is a sort of brownish-purple. Oh dear.

Ok, imagine this: you’ve zoomed in close to make sure the line you’re drawing along the top of a rectangle is just right. You drag it along, and, as you scroll (at a ridiculously slow speed), the rectangle starts to duplicate itself. You let go, the picture goes back to normal, and you’ve moved about a millimetre.

Oh, and if you insert an autoshape, then go back and try to draw another one, it’ll reset to the default shape. Great.

Then there’re just some very, very random things. Like, the default nudge offset is 2.54mm, the maximum zoom level is 405651%, and when you import a picture, it’s physically impossible to view it without it being pixelated (though, of course, it prints just fine).
Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I can get onto more interesting matters. (Note how I say interesting – I mean, of course, ‘other’).

Monday was… three days ago, and I can’t remember what happened.
The only part of Tuesday I can remember, is staying behind to do graphics. Likewise, the only part of Wednesday I can remember is missing lessons to do graphics, and then staying behind to do - you get the picture.
I stayed behind tonight as well, for two hours. And (halle-fuckin’-lujah) got it all done. Except the question cards, which I remembered I’d forgotten the moment I walked out of school. Oh well!

In graphic-unrelated news, I was told by my English teacher today that I got the highest coursework grades in the class. I probably shouldn’t have written that, but there you go.

Musically, my Manics obsession is steadily growing, with my acquisition of number of B-Sides (thanks Chloe!), and the God Save the Manics EP, which is frankly amazing. They’ve also given me the title for this entry, and I’ve changed my sig on black0ps to this:

“Conservatives say there ain't no black in the Union Jack
Democrats say there ain't enough white in the Stars and Stripes
And we say there's not enough black in the Union Jack
And we say there's too much white in the Stars and Stripes”

If that offends you, then you shouldn’t be reading this. Go away.

I also got my self a James Dean Bradfield avatar, and I already own a ‘Brain-dead motherfucker’ badge and a Lipstick Traces t-shirt, so now the only thing left to do is wait for them to overtake Placebo on last.fm. It won’t take long.

I’ve rambled long enough, so I’m going to go play GTA and try and take my mind off the fact that I’ve just remembered I have a maths paper to do on Monday. I find standing on a tram and firing heat-seeking missiles at people is quite a good way to alleviate stress.

Bastard school.

Nooooooo (etc)!

2006-04-23T23:23:00.000+01:00

In approximately 1½ hours from now, at 00:00, 24th April 2006, the day of my return to school will start, and, somewhere in my head, a little tiny brain-man will fall to his knees and scream “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”.

This is the second time I’ve tried writing this entry. The first time, it turned into a page full of paragraphs that were two lines long and said the same thing in different ways, and that decreased exponentially in comedy value. At the moment, I’m doing quite well because I have one three-line paragraph MICROSOFT and one as-yet-unknown-but-more-than-two-line paragraph who’s comedic value I’m going to let you be the judge of, because if I say anything about it it’ll make everything else sound like I have my head stuck up my arse. Oh, and if that first paragraph isn’t three lines long, then please, blame Word for not being the same width as Blogger. If it is, blame Word anyway because nobody likes Microsoft.

I was about to say that I didn’t do anything yesterday, but I’ve just remembered that I wrote the exact same thing in my diary and then went onto contradict myself completely.

My mum finally managed to get me to go to Buxton to get some sunglasses for our holiday in July. Whenever I go to get new glasses I’m always wary of the people who sit in front of you and fit them to your head – I think I’ve probably been mentally scarred by one such person who deemed it necessary to get out of her chair, walk round the table to me, sit directly in front and then breath out a load of pickled-onion smelling fumes directly into my face.

Onto more exciting occurrences, and a trip to WHSmiths provided us with the evenings audiovisual entertainment, in the form of 28 Days Later and Dog Soldiers on DVD, for £2.99 each. Bargain, especially when you take into consideration the fact that the former contains a scene where the main character inserts both his thumbs into the eye sockets of a screaming man, and the latter shows a dog trying to eat an army sergeant’s intestine while he’s still alive. Definitely family-orientated entertainment, then.

During the watching of these films, I ate far too many of ‘Tesco’s own’ Doritos, (which go great with Tzatziki or yoghurt, if you didn’t already know), though my excuse was that I could still taste garlic bread from the night before. Following this, Collateral Damage, featuring everyone’s favourite Arnold, was on C4, so we watched that as well. It was, as most Arnie films are, a nice big piece of government-worship, but SUCK apart from that it was pretty good.

I also got a new colour ink cartridge from Tesco, in the hope of printing some of my graphics coursework. It was only once I got home that I realised the only white paper I had was about as thick as Steven Hawking.

Before you dismiss my Easter holiday as a BUM complete waste of time, you should know that I did, infact, dabble around on BBC Bitesize for a while today. So there.

When I started writing, I had one and a half hours left of my last day of freedom. Now I have 40 minutes, so I’m gonna bugger off.

Goodbye; I might be some time.

(Oh, and please, check out the post below this)
(Oh, oh, if you got the subliminal message, good for you)

Little Volcanoes

2006-04-23T22:16:00.000+01:00

Not much in the way of a dazzlingly humourous, original and just generally fantastic entry here. Just a shameless plug for the best (and arguably only - a lot goes in, and if it does come out, it's generally in little pieces) thing to come out of a flat in Rusholme in a long time.

If you haven't already clicked the links in the sidebar-thing, then here they are again:

www.littlevolcanoes.com, and their myspace, erm, space

Click, listen, download, listen.

If you have a last.fm profile, then you can also reap the satisfactory benefits of 'feeling all warm and fuzzy' by adding to their profile.

No offence to anyone who lives in Rusholme was intended, but if it occurred, then go suck a lemon. Or something.

Happy Holidays

2006-04-21T23:51:00.000+01:00

Happy Easter and all that.

This holiday was, according to one of our teachers, not actually a holiday, merely a span of time in which to revise. Well, so much for that, as the past two or three days have been the only time where I’ve been physically able to touch anything related to schoolwork (computer notwithstanding, obviously). Much of it has been spent doing graphics coursework, though my progress has been halted due to the fact that I don’t own a laser cutter, can’t find a craft knife anywhere, and don’t have any white A4 card. On top of that, the school’s amazing new system which lets you access the server remotely is completely buggered, and I was rather relying on it’s functionality as some bastard nicked my USB pen.

Onto slightly more interesting issues, and the Tuesday just gone saw me, and three friends (including Emily), having an ‘Easter party’, of sorts. Admittedly, it was more of a ‘get together’ than anything else, but it was fun nonetheless, featuring such games as ‘pin the egg in the middle of the nest’. Needless to say, the act of spinning the blindfolded person got a tad out of hand, to the point where it was physically impossible to stand up, and one egg in particular got stuck to the wall about thirty centimetres wide of the nest.

The lack of alcohol was a bit of a disappointment; I’ve never actually got drunk (as far as I’m aware, at any rate), but it definitely helps to break the ice. The fact that the ice was already broken isn’t relevant, so shut up.

After a walk round the ultra-lively centre of all things exciting that is Bamford, which involved feeding ducks, we returned home to eat spaghetti Bolognese. One of the aforementioned friends, Heather, was reluctant to visit the ducks at first, fearing that ‘they might have bird flu’. However, I pointed out, as I’ve said in one of my previous entries, that she had, to my knowledge, no intention of kissing the ducks or fondling their faeces, and that the chances of them all leaping out of the water to cough on her were a gabillion to one. This seemed to snap her out of her state of rabid paranoia, and pretty soon we were all on our way to the duck pond, eagerly anticipating the adrenaline-filled thrill that is throwing bread into a bit of water. When we arrived at the pond, how many ducks were there? Two. Yep, despite the overcoming of birdfluophobia, the scrounging of bread, and the walk, only two of the lazy bastards could be arsed to poke their heads out of the reeds.

I’m joking, ducks are great really, but it is slightly disheartening when you’ve brought a feast for a few hundred of them and only a couple turn out. Nevertheless, we fed them, and I probably injured one of them as well. Without giving away too much information, let’s just say it got in the way of the bread.

At this rate I’ll end up with a book on duck-feeding, so I’ll stop.

Following the duck encounter, we walked along the footpath, across the river, and to a big field. Without my knowledge, it had somehow been decided that Heather and Emily were going to run to one end of the field and back. Really, I have absolutely no idea why they decided to do this. I can only hazard a guess that they were trying to make themselves hungry or something. Anyway, they set off, leaving me and Olivia stood at the edge of the field laughing at the way the other two ran.

On their return, Heather went home to start the spag bol, and me, Emily and Olivia went to the shop to get drinks and some natural yoghurt. Yoghurt became something of a discussion point between us; to them the thought of putting it on spaghetti Bolognese seemed absurd, but to me it just seems natural. If I was Richard Madeley I’d probably start a text-vote on who eats spaghetti Bolognese with yoghurt. However, as always, I’m not (thank fuck), so I won’t.

After much confusion and general hilarity as Heather’s lounge was, piece by piece, taken apart and rebuilt into four beds, we sat, or lay, rather, down to watch a film. Final Destination was our original choice, but Heather decided she didn’t want to watch it, which led to my creating a compromise, ‘Let’s just watch till the first death’. For those of you unfamiliar with Final Destination, this is someone being asphyxiated by a shower cord. Moments earlier, the same person had decided it would be a good idea to try and shave with a dry razor, no shaving foam, and a dry face, and then practically shoved the razor into their neck. Quite why anyone would be so immensely stupid is a mystery, but there you go.

The second movie, One Night at McCools, was, it has to be said, very good. Though, having said that, I was extremely tired and in the end the only thing keeping me awake was the woman in it. Really though, it’s a great movie, especially if you’re into men dressed in chains and jock straps getting crushed by big garbage cans. Class.

Well, I’ve expended far too much energy on this entry. I know this because WinAmp has played through two-and-a-half full albums while I’ve been typing, as well as Dani California by Red Hot Chili Peppers, which is an awesome song.

Tech Support From Hell

2006-04-17T18:11:00.000+01:00

Last night, I turned the computer off. Wow, I hear you say. Wow indeed, because when my mum came to turn it on this morning, it appeared to have given up the ghost and gone to live in silicone heaven.

It loaded the BIOS just fine, and I was even able to use F2 and F12 to get into Setup and the Boot Menu. However, after the BIOS screen, we were faced with a ‘message’ which the computer’s electronic rectum had evidently thought hilarious to expel. The message was ‘L 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99… etc’.

After much fannying about, many phone calls, and a run through Dell’s hardware diagnostic CD (which produced ‘passes’ for every piece of hardware), my mum rang DHell’s Tech Support centre. The woman on the other end of the phone, after playing us a tinny rendition of some 1980’s pop song for 5 minutes, eventually got round to offering us something in the way of help. First, we were told to just try and let the computer boot up normally, and explain the message. It took another two minutes for her to brain to process the incoming vocal transmission, and she finally told us to unplug everything, and leave just the power cord in the back of the tower. Quite how she managed to diagnose anything with the monitor cable unplugged is a mystery to me. She realised the rather fundamental flaw in her plan, though, and we were advised to plug the monitor back in.

Still no luck. Then, we were told to unplug everything and hold down the power button for ten seconds, which apparently performs a power drain, or something. Whether or not this actually did anything remains unknown, but we plugged everything back in and it still didn’t boot.

The next thing Mrs. Remote Assistance told us to do was press F8 ‘while the Dell logo was on the screen’. She wanted to get into Safe Mode, though evidently she didn’t understand that she was asking us to use the keyboard before it had been loaded. Needless to say, we were informed of a ‘keyboard failure’ by the computer, and the L 99 message reared its ugly head once more. The help woman then told us to try another keyboard. How the hell did this crazy bitch get a job?!

She then said that the only way we could use the computer again, would be to get a technician out to wipe the hard drive, then reinstall Windows. When asked how we’d go about getting a backup, she said ‘I’m not really sure’.

At this point, my mum got a bit stressed, and ended the phone call by saying ‘You haven’t been very helpful. Goodbye’.

The problem was still there though, and it didn’t appear to want to go away. I remembered reading about the problem somewhere, (I think it was black0ps), but I couldn’t remember if (a) there was a solution, and (b) if there was, what the hell it was.

Then, I had a brainwave.

Sometime last year, I installed Mandriva Linux LE 2005. It was great, but I couldn’t get it to work with my BT Voyager modem, and thus it was rendered a bit useless. When I uninstalled it a couple of months ago, though, I never removed the LILO boot manager. I thought that this might have been the cause of the problem, so I decided to try and reinstall Linux.
This took about half an hour, and when it had finished, lo-and-behold, LILO returned, and I could boot into Windows.

It turns out the problem is because of a corrupt Master Boot Record (MBR). I’m not entirely sure how it got corrupted in the first place, but there you go.

So, not only is Linux a better OS all round (nonexistent support for BT Voyager Modems notwithstanding), but it can help lesser OS’s get their arses back into shape.

Three cheers for Tux!

Oh, and if I ever meet that bloody tech support woman…

Mmm, Grease...

2006-04-13T14:26:00.000+01:00

This entry is belated at best.

Last Friday, I went to see our school production, Grease, (if you haven’t heard of it, then OMG). It was, to say the least, very good. Despite the fact that I’d never watched Grease all the way through before, wasn’t completely aware of the plot, and got lost in the story about halfway through, it was still the best school production I’ve ever seen. Yup, even better than Another Arbitrary Religious Tale Told by Reception Class.

The actual play started at 7:30, which meant we had to be there at 7:15-ish, and school itself finishes at 3:45. The first hour or so was spent eating; we (that’s me and my girlfriend), went down to the village and bought a microwaveable cottage pie. While she went back and cooked that, I had to put up with fifteen minutes of being tormented by small children with Gameboys in the Chinese, waiting for a portion of chips. It was worth it though, just for the discovery of an amazing new food combination. If you need telling what that combination was, then please, go back to sleep.

So, from 5:30 to 7:15, or thereabouts, I was doing coursework. Needless to say, the time was spent doing graphics. I made some rules for my board game, as well as another document containing some piddly little notes, then spent ten minutes while the printer next to me (the same printer whose ass I so unashamedly kissed in one of my previous entries), consumed my A4 piece of card, then spewed it back out again after a five minute wait; with nothing on it. Bloody wonderful. From there, I spent a couple of minutes fumbling around for the light switch in the food tech room (this adjoins the art room where I was working), then headed straight for the computer area at the back. I turned everything on, went back, and sent the documents to print on the as-crap-as-humanly-possible printer there. ‘Hah’, I thought, until I realised I’d forgotten to turn the print server on and that my documents were hanging around in a cable somewhere between the two rooms. Once I’d turned the print server on, the only thing left to do was wait. And wait I did. I waited and waited. Once I’d finished waiting, I did some more waiting. Then, suddenly, I saw the start of the card poke through the insides of the printer. By this time, I was thoroughly bored, so I went and ate an apple; something whose excitement level seemed to me to be equivalent to that of throwing bricks at George Bush’s genitals. And that has got to be bloody exciting.

Anyway, back to Grease. When it finally started, I was sitting right at the back, arguably the best view in ‘the house’ (not counting the lighting deck, but I’m not sure if the bigwigs would have been all too happy if we’d sat on that…). At the interval, we (me, Paul, Ben and Neirin) got some food, and then had a ‘friendly chat’ with the hardcore-chavette daughters of one of the more chavvy teachers, who seemed to be attempting to clamber up one of the bag racks in the corridor.

When Grease finished, at about 10:30, the ‘aftershow party’ began. This cast-only affair meant that we weren’t allowed in the hall, so we found other things to do to entertain ourselves. Things like walking round the school in the pitch black. Who said school was boring?

This didn’t last too long, however, and we ended up back in the hall, watching innocently from the sides. We did this for about two minutes, until the drama teacher saw us, said ‘I want a word with you’, and then proceeded to lecture us on ‘How many hours they’ve put in to deserve this’. Fair enough, but she crossed the line when she told us that ‘School isn’t a public place, you shouldn’t even be in here’, and then tried to kick us out into the rain. She even opened the door and motioned for us to leave.

There was no way we were going to be forced to stand outside in the freezing cold for an hour, so Ben started shouting at her and we were eventually given the ultimate privilege of being allowed to sit in reception. Evidently she couldn’t grasp the concept of (a) me going back to my girlfriends’ house, (b) Paul and Ben being given a lift home by one of the teachers and thus having to stay in school till midnight, and (c) Neirin getting picked up by his parents.

During the course of our stay in reception, we thoroughly examined the Health and Safety poster, and what she did, we concluded, wasn’t wholly legal. You can contradict me all you like, but attempting to force four kids into the pouring rain just because they were round the edges of the hall is overreacting just a little bit.

Grease was still fantastic though, and nothing could change that.

Now, I wonder if it’d be possible to lodge a formal complaint…

Yes, I'm still alive

2006-04-06T21:55:00.000+01:00

…though quite how, I have no idea. The news this morning that bird flu has officially reached Britain is, shall we say, disheartening. But then, I have no plans to go and fondle strange birds, before devouring their faeces, and neither have I ever done, so I suppose that’s ample reason for my continued existence.

The other ongoing near-death ‘experience’ is a little thing called ‘coursework’, or ‘shit’, to those in the business. Following the rather hushed and sudden departure of our graphics teacher - to hospital – we (that’s my graphics class), were jolted back into reality, ever so kindly, by one of the other tech teachers. It would seem our ‘proper’ graphics teacher had in fact been living in some strange dream world where time was merely a blob of Plasticine to be moulded in whatever way he desired. Example? He insisted on talking at us for ten minutes at the start of every lesson, the reason for this being his continued insistence that it would ‘save us time in the long run’. Ah, right, so that’s why we’ve been left with a week (that’s the week ending, umm, tomorrow), in which to completely finish our coursework.

Everything I just said is irrelevant, (although a hilarious derivation is Joel’s profound and earth-shatteringly philosophical assumption that he ‘went to hospital because his nose fell off’).

So, coursework. Excluding paperwork and including miracles that can only have been brought about by God (a.k.a., Mr Cooper), I’ve almost finished my Graphics. The coursework task was to design a board game, which has led to me spending about three hours (and counting) cutting out forty-four little card building nets, which, when unfolded from their flat-pack state, slot neatly into my laser-cut board(s). This can be fiddly, sometimes, but it’s a concept described by the head of the tech department as ‘awesome’. Get in.

Maths. I finished it today, in last period. Apparently, it was supposed to be in on Monday. It’s been a constant source of unbridled stress right from the word go; not only is Spearman’s Rank quite possibly the most irritating mathematical function I’ve ever come across, but when a class full of people are all attempting to use 5 computers at the same time, computers which appear to be run by hamsters, something has to give. In this case, that something was my sanity. I’ve got it back now, I think, but for a while I seriously felt like I was a hollowed out shell of a human being. OK, not really, but I like that phrase.

Moments before starting this blog entry, I blitzed my evaluation for my ICT coursework, and spent about half an hour on my user documentation. Well, twenty-five minutes designing the front cover of my user documentation then five minutes in which to be both annoyed and relieved when I realised I’d already done it all. Bah. Yay.

I’m writing this in Word, by the way, using the Blogger plugin, so, if everything goes arse-up, as anything related to M$ usually and inevitably, at some stage in its life, does, you know who to blame. *Looks at Mr. Gates*.

That brings us nicely to the end of my can-be-arsed-to-write-wittily-and-in-complex-sentences mood.

N’night.

An Arty "Hurrah"ty Party. And some angry dinner ladies

2006-03-28T21:31:00.000+01:00

BASTARD. STUPID, STUPID BASTARD. Having typed for near on half an hour, (which is a lot of writing if you're me), Windows decided to die and hurl BSODs at me. Just brilliant. Well, here we go again, in Notepad this time. *saves*.

Today was "the big one", and by that, I mean of course, the 5-hour session in our art exam. If you've been following the other art entries, you'll know that I decided to take my tower into school; the reasoning behind this arguably idiotic decision being that I discovered, with alarming immediacy, that my painting skills, when it comes to canvases, are limited at best. But, more on art later.

We arrived at school this morning only to be confronted by a congregation of dinner ladies protesting about pensions, one of whom looked about ready to die from boredom. All credit to the rest of them, I don't think I'd be able to cope with standing around in the rain waving a signpost above my head. Because of the strike, we weren't allowed to stay inside the school building at lunch or break because, apparantly, letting kids stay inside with no midday supervisors means they'll start throwing litter at each other. It also meant that my hopes of playing GTA at the said times, (the disc having been "accidentally" left in my CD drive), were dashed.

So, at break, me, Emily, Liv and Heather ventured outside. For me, the experience was pretty new; I haven't been outside at break or lunch for about six months. For good reason too - it was bloody freezing. Break also threw up a rather interesting conundrum. While the dinner ladies were out protesting for their right to a pension, we were being denied our right to go to the toilet. A right of the "basic human" type, as the art teacher later pointed out, after awarding us a 5-minute break in which to race to the toilet. I say us, but I can count the amount of times I've used the school toilets on one hand. Infact, "toilets" is gross exaggeration. I don't know about the girls', but the boys' comprises of a piece of metal stuck to the wall via the adhesive properties of a few decades' worth of chewing gum, with a grill at the bottom and some rotting bits of soap which were obviously put there in an attempt to get rid of the horrific smell, but in reality just exacerbate the stench to the point where the only possible time you'd be able to tolerate it is if someone force-fed you a bottle full of laxatives.

At dinner, after we'd eaten our compulsary packed lunches at speeds which would make a tortoise look like Concorde, after Heather and Liv had seemingly disappeared, and after a short walk which resulted in shouting at some small fat Y8/9s to "fuck off", we found warmth in the music room. The teacher residing in the aforementioned classroom (that would be the music teacher, then), seemed to be the only one in the whole school with an ounce of pity.

Anyway, back to art. The morning saw me carry on with my gargantuan final piece. It's A3, which, admittedly isn't pariticularly gargantuan in reality, but it seems like a bloody football pitch when you're designing something that size in Photoshop on a computer running at 1024x768. In hindsight, I probably could have upped the monitor settings, but hey. So, there I was, beavering away like, well, a beaver (albeit a beaver with a sound knowledge of Photoshop), on a final piece, which, at 3508x4961 pixels, was about 20 times the size of the screen it was being displayed on. Needless to say, Photoshop's RAM usage skyrocketed, to the point where at one point I had 4Mb of the stuff left. My computer has a gig of RAM, so, minus all the arbitrary processes and services that were being run (and even afer I'd ended everything unnecessary), PS must have been using about 800Mb. The folder containing the various versions of the image is almost 2Gb; with each image coming in at around 100 - 200Mb. Exported as full quality JPEG, my final piece is 15Mb. Dear God...

But, I persevered, and I got there in the end. It was only with about half an hour of the day left that I realised I hadn't plugged the printer into the back of my tower, and that it was still inserted, smugly, into the art rooms' computer. A quick transfer of a brick-like cable later, followed by a 2-minute long wait while XP hunted for the drivers, and I was set to go. Seriously, I don't think I've ever witnessed a printer work so slowly. But, credit where credit's due, HP did a fantastic job on their 1220c printers; it printed perfectly, (with the exception of a tiny bit of cropping round the edges which I knew was going to happen anyway). Thanks go to my art teacher too, for wisely investing in some A3 photo paper.

There was crowd of about six people stood round the printer as it churned out the last few centimetres of the 50Mb behemoth, (and myself not included as I was far too busy getting fruit polos off Emily). Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the art teacher attempt to lift the paper out of the printers' tray, which resulted in me running across the room screaming, "It's not dry!". I think she had a heart attack or coronary failure of some sort, because she dropped it and made a sort of gasping sound.

Ordeal over, I stayed after school to do some finishing off and decide what I was going to do next. In my eternal wisdom, and as I wrote above, (somewhere), I'd saved the image multiple times, and in varying stages of completion. It was decided that I should print off each image, to prove that I hadn't simply nicked my final piece of the 'net, and to show development of ideas, etc etc. That took about ten minutes (the idea, not the actual "doing-of"), which left me with forty-five in which to run errands for people. "People" being Heather, and "errands" being "putting things back". Really, the mess she'd made in the space of five hours was of a level physically unattainable by anyone except her.

Then, it was time to go home. Again, in my eternal wisdom, I'd told my mum to wait in the car park rather than "round the side", closer to the art rooms. It was pissing it down. If, as is often mused by small, irritating children, rain is actually God's "weewee", then someone must have drilled holes in his knob because I haven't seen a downpour like that in a long time. It's a miracle my computer still works actually, the inside must have resembled something of a swimming pool by the time I got it to the car. I don't even want to think about the possibility of the BSOD I got earlier being in anyway related to the leisurely paddle my motherboard took.

On a completely unrelated note, the A-team was awesome tonight.

Magazines, celebrities and evolution

2006-03-24T19:16:00.000Z

This post is about one thing and (hopefully) one thing only: celebrity gossip magazines. Yep, the glossy excuses for literary publications that are consuming the UK (and probably the rest of the world) with their ceaseless so-called "articles" about what the latest C-list celebrity wannabe had for tea last night.

If you watch TV, which I'm sure most of you do, you can't escape the hundreds of adverts for Now, Heat, and the million other adverts shouting from the rooftops that they have the latest gossip before anyone else does, and that your failure to purchase their magazine will obviously result in you being mocked by everyone you know and result in a nervous breakdown. Because, let's face it, you totally don't deserve to live if you don't know who Brad Timberlake is shagging, and that his enstranged ex-lover is now snorting crack cocaine through a biro in the basement of some shady nightclub.

The truth is quite the opposite; if you're seen reading one of these publications, people will instantly know that you're a pea-brained, narrow-minded, pop-culture-driven pathetic excuse for an intelligent being.

Since I got back from school, I've seen the latest advert for "NOW" three times. Apparantly, in this week/fortnight/month's riveting edition, "Jade grills Chantelle about everything". The fact that anyone would want to read an interview between possibly the two stupidest people in England beggars belief; an interview held by someone who thought Rio De Janeiro was a person and to whom a sentence more complex than "I would like a sandwich" is beyond comprehension. The whole sordid issue is just another indication of the descent of the UK into a celeb-worshipping tribe of reality TV addicts. Ours is probably the only country in the world where someone with an IQ of approximately 10 can go from total obscurity (except for maybe getting their tits out at a Westlife gig once), to a nationwide celebrity overnight, simply by going on TV and, to put it politely, introducing their genitals to the business end of a beer bottle. (If you were alive when the last series of Big Brother was on, you'll know what I mean).

Am I overreacting? No. The latest holiday pictures of some model, having put on a few pounds and now looking more like an actual human than a skeleton with some skin draped on it, is really nothing to get excited about. Yet, week after week after week, we're bombarded with the nonsensical ramblings of some prying journo who claims to have the scoop of the year in the form of a picture of Samuel L. Jackson picking his nose.

Ok, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's rewind a bit. To start with, there are three basic sub-types of this sort of magazine. First, there's the kind that focusses mainly on the overnight celebs I mentioned earlier. Maybe every so often you'll get a tiny beach photo of George Clooney (or, if you're really lucky, that Jackson-picks-nose picture I wrote about) which will form the basis of a double-page spread of what is essentially pure libel . Then, there's the kind which devotes itself to the lives of real people. They've done themselves no favours there, by calling the general public "real people" they must, by default, consider celebrities to be some sort of higher breed of mammal. Then, of course, there's the hybrids; NOW is one such magazine. Its appeal is widened by the fact that not only does it contain stories about Geordie binmen, but also embraces C-list celebrities. It pleases everyone, doesn't it? Let me put it this way - could Jade Goody program a VCR?

Like I said before, the whole affair doesn't bode well.

It does, infact, completely disprove Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Sometime in the 90's, the human race started going backwards. When good ol' Charlie devised his theory, he didn't count on c-list celebrities to whom the word "evolution" was just a car made by Mitsubishi, jumping in and ruining everything.

Frankly, things were better when we were all Neanderthals and people like Miss Goody got pummelled and eaten. That's what I call a way of life.

For Beta For Worse

2006-03-20T20:06:00.000Z

A few months ago, I downloaded Internet Explorer Beta 1. It was, it has to be said, a vast improvement on the previous versions. A couple of days ago, I finally got motivated to download IE7BP2 (what an acronym...). I tried installing it, but I was promptly informed that I "already had a version of Internet Explorer 7 installed on my computer". Thanks for pointing that one out, M$.

If any of you are having the same issue, the solution to a seemingly uninstallable IE7BP1 is this:

First, make sure you have enabled the viewing of hidden files and folders. If you don't know what this is, open My Documents (or any folder), then go to Tools -> Folder options -> View. Find, in the scroll box, "Hidden files and folders". Voila.

Start -> Run -> %windir%\$NtUninstallie7beta1$\spuninst\spuninst.exe

This little snippet was converted from M$'s guide to uninstalling Beta Preview 2.

Anyway, on with the show. What's new? Well, aside from a few interface overhauls which I'll expand on later, the IE team seem to have spent more time making the ring round the little "e" gold than they have improving anything else. Oh, and it’s now “Windows Internet Explorer”.

I'm not going to patronise you with reasons why IE's rendering and support for things is crap. Instead, I'm going to give you a link to one of the most informative sites I've found on Explorer's flaws. But, I'm going to give you that at the end so that you won't run off without reading about the interface.

Right then.

Consider this: someone, let's say "a rich American man called Bill", asks you to describe a classic Windows/M$ browser window (Firefox, IE6 and below, Opera, etc). Easy-peasy, right? You have the standard stuff across the top - File, Edit, etc. Underneath that, you'll find the Back/Forward buttons, along with Home, Stop, Refresh, and the like. And, next to these, is the address bar. After that there's a "Go" button (or some other word with the same meaning). Still further along, there might be a search bar (there will be a search bar if you're using Firefox). Beneath all this, there might be a bookmarks toolbar. Finally, if you’re lucky, you might get some tabs.

Microsoft, in their eternal wisdom, have opted instead to set fire to this setup that we all embrace (well, maybe not all of us, but the setup works and there’s nothing wrong with it). Now, today’s world is constantly changing, technology and computers even more so. We appreciate change; change is good (usually…). Not this time.

Mr Gates and his cohorts have gone for the, shall we say, minimalist look. To the point where the two buttons tucked away in the top left hand corner where we’re used to seeing File and Edit, are the browser navigation buttons. Infact, where the hell is the “normal” menu? Evidently M$ thought removing it would be a good idea, and so it’s hidden by default. Just perfect for all those people who aren’t particularly computer-savvy.

Back to the interface, and next to the back and forward buttons is the address bar. Where the hell are Stop, Refresh, and Home? Well, Stop is now found at the end of the address bar, right after the button which appears to be saying “click me and I’ll refresh the page for you”, but moonlights as the Go button for the address bar. This is great, it means any change you make to the URL disables the Refresh button. As for the Home button? That’s miles away. I’ll get round to it later.

After the Stop and Refresh/Go/(If you’re lucky) buttons, there’s a new, ultra cool search bar. Why is it cool? Because if you type in it then hit return, Windows will spew forth a lovely “ding” error sound, before loading your search results. The IE team obviously had those budding electronic music enthusiasts in mind when they added that feature. On the other hand, it does have a lovely picture of a magnifying glass.

Finally, we come to IE’s best new feature, but one that is hardly original nowadays (and that other browser users will take for granted) – tabs. Yes, wonderful, lovely, beautiful tabs. Except that Internet Explorer’s are neither wonderful nor lovely, and to call them beautiful would be a crime against humanity. At the start of the “tab row”, there is a circular button with a star inside, and next to that, a plus button. Any person with an ounce of common sense would rationally deduce that either of these could be a “new tab” button; and, most probably, the plus button would be their number one choice. So, which one is it? Neither. Yup, Microsoft stuck a whopping great big plus button next to the tabs and immediately expects you instantly recognise it as the button for putting the page in your favourites. (That star button is also for favourites, by the way, except that it opens a list of all your favourites).

I’ll come to the tabs themselves later on. At the end of the tab-row, we find, at last, the Home button. Quite why it’s there will remain a mystery, but there you go. After that, there’s the RSS button, then Print, some Page tools, and some Tools, err, tools. All of these icons have little drop-downs associated with them, due in no small part to the fact that, as I mentioned before, the toolbar is nowhere to be found.

So, the tabs. Before I continue, I should point out that the whole interface is glass-mad. Everything has a shine on it; from the navigation buttons to the little printer icon, the glass highlight is there. The same goes for the tabs, and, needless to say, it does them no favours. Admittedly, the rest of the interface doesn’t interfere with what you’re looking at, but the tabs stick out like a sore thumb. And I don’t mean pin-prick sore; I’m talking hit-with-a-hammer-and-now-slowly-rotting-off-and-being-eaten-by-tiny-maggots sore. Ouch. Just looking at the centre of the screen, your gaze is constantly distracted by the large shiny rectangle hovering above your active page like the harbinger of your glossy, glass-highlighted doom. Maybe you’ll fall 57 stories through a new window in your office. Who knows?

The way in which you die is irrelevant (and also slightly depressing, (though I’m guessing more depressing for you than me)). Basically, if you’re currently using IE, when the time comes to upgrade to Version 7, please please PLEASE start using another browser. If not for your own sanity, then for mine. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve attempted to persuade IE-users to switch to Firefox, only to have them reject it because it isn’t made by Microsoft.

I’m not going to turn this into a post about why Fx is so much better, but take my word, it is. 155 million people can’t be wrong.

That article I was telling you about: http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/wrongWithIE/

More Stupid Noobs

2006-03-19T21:19:00.000Z

"Hey it is Andy and john the directors of MSN, sorry for the interruption but msn is closing down. this is because too many inconsiderate people are taking up all the name (eg making up lots of different accounts for just one person), we only have 578 names left. If you would like to close your account, DO NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE ON. If you would like to keep your account, then SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST.

This is no joke, we will be shutting down the servers. Send it on, thanks.

WHO EVER DOES NOT SEND THIS MESSEAGE, YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE CLOSED AND YOU WILL COST £10.00 A MONTH TO USE. SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST.

NOW YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO. PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS or REPLAY. COPY THE WHOLE EMAIL. GO BACK TO YOUR INBOX AND CLICK ON NEW. AND PASTE THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION"

Perhaps someone with a miniscule knowledge of how things work on the Internet might be a tiny bit scared by the contents of this email, forwarded to me by Emily (and yes, she'd realised it was a bundle of shit - I was the only one she sent it to). Evidently, there are numerous people inhabiting the virtual world who take this stuff seriously. How do I know this? Because this message was nested three deep by the time it arrived in my inbox.

Really, people.

I'm a bit of a language nut, so I'm going to have to take the message to bits.

First, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the director of a multi-billion dollar company's online community face is going to be able to use capital letters. I know some hardcore anti-M$ nutter will say that this is simply a subconscious display of the arrogance adopted by all Microsoft employees - that they do not see the need to bother learning the English language because they all talk in Visual Basic and deem a "proper" language to be below them. And I'll say: bollocks. Any company director is going to be literate, and even if they aren't, they have secretaries to mop up after them.

Secondly, this is Microsoft we're talking about. An email from the company belonging to the world's richest man is hardly going to adopt a conversational tone - especially when it's about to shove millions of users off its servers and onto lesser IM clients and email providers. Apparantly they have 578 names left, because people are "taking up all the name". Think about this one for just a second.
The English language has 26 letters and 10 numbers (0-9). Email providers let you put periods (.) and underscores (_) in your email addresses, as well other bits of punctuation reserved for those who wish to have annoying addresses that destroy your keyboard and make your fingers drop off when attempting to type them, and all because "some_AnNoYING.baSTARRRD_23621@hotmail.com" decided it would be "totally hip" to create an address whose constituent parts are letters of alternating case, randomly spliced punctuation, and an arbitrary 5-digit number shoved on the end to give it "that edge".
What I'm trying to say, albeit in a very long-winded way, is that there are millions upon millions of possible combinations with just letters and numbers alone. When you add in punctuation, the possibilities are virtually limitless. (I say "virtually" because no doubt email providers impose a limit on the number of characters you can have in your email address).
And to the arse who is reading this thinking about trying to create a email address containing the first chapter of a book: just don't.

Ok, where was I? Oh yes, the bit where good ol' "Andy and john" start shouting "WHO EVER DOES NOT SEND THIS MESSEAGE, YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE CLOSED AND YOU WILL COST £10.00 A MONTH TO USE. SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST."
Really, "MESSEAGE"? Aside from the laugable grammar, Andy (or possibly John), appear to have forgotten that, as MSN directors, they live in America, where a "pound" is either a unit of measurement or a good pummelling. Of course, they could just be being friendly to UK audiences.

Finally, their sign-off, which reads (incase you can't be arsed scrolling back up): "NOW YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO. PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS or REPLAY. COPY THE WHOLE EMAIL. GO BACK TO YOUR INBOX AND CLICK ON NEW. AND PASTE THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION". The fact that the directors of MSN are incapable of using own emailing service and are dreaming up new features such as "replay" on-the-fly is slightly concerning. Well, it might be if it were the slightest bit true. They also seem to have taken a like to splicing random punctuation; a bit like some of the people who use the email service do with their email addresses.

That just about concludes that particular article, but I've got another one stashed away. Oh hurrah.

It reads thus: "I dont normally send this sort of stuff out but had a
look on the internet and its actually true. On the 1st of november, we will
have to pay for the use of our MSN and email accounts
unless we send this message to at least 18 contacts on your contact
list. It's no joke if you don't believe me then to the site
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1189119.stm ) and see for
yourself. Anyways once you've sent this message to at least 18
contacts , your msn dude will become blue. please copy and paste don't
forward cos people won't take notice of it.".

What the article conveniently fails to mention (its creator probably too drunk too care), is that the article it references is 5 years old. It also leaves us in mystery as to just how it plans to manipulate our email applications (be they desktop or web-based), to open the code that messenger runs off, find the definitions for system tray icons, and change them to something else (all without having to close and reopen messenger). And even if this was possible, then frankly, my firewall would have a field day.

The first time I got this particular message, I responded with a list of links and such-like, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that messenger is staying free. The next time someone sent it me, someone I'd sent my proof email to, (and this time bearing the subject "another forward but this one is true") I simply replied with "FOR FUCKS SAKE, [name removed], THAT ARTICLE IS FIVE YEARS OLD". Doubtless they still took no notice.

For those beyond the reach of rational thought; those who beleve everything they read online, there really is no hope.

Snow joke (groan...)

2006-03-16T21:39:00.000Z

You'll have to excuse the pathetic title for this blog. My excuse is that I'm tired. Of course, I'm not, but what do you care?

Anyway, yesterday was pretty interesting. The taxi turned round half way to school because of the snow, which would normally have meant we got the day off (read: asleep). But, when I got home, I realised that I had an absolutely gargantuan pile of coursework to get through. At school.

So, I rung the taxi driver and got her to come and pick me up and take me to the train station. After waiting at the station for 5 minutes, Rob turned up. We got involved in a discussion about just how bloody annoying it is when people just saunter into the train station moments before the train arrives, and you've been stood there for half an hour freezing your balls off. This discussion was held in, lets say, an elevated tone; probably just loud enough for the bitch who'd just wandered in gormlessly to hear.

Anyway, the train finally arrived, and, as one is wont to do in such a situation, we boarded it. It was £1.65 to Hope, and I'm fairly sure I pissed off just about everyone on the train by paying my fare with a combination of 20 and 10p pieces. Guffaw.

The train got into Hope at about 9:35. Far too early. Sensing a great opportunity to dawdle, we walked (almost) to Bamford and back. If you're reading this and these places mean nothing to you, then that'll teach you to not live in Derbyshire. Whatever, we probably walked about 3-4 miles there and back. The aim was to miss maths, which would have meant we'd needed to stay out until 11:45. Our " plan" didn't exactly work and we found ourselves back in Hope in time for the start of break (10:25).

Another detour was required.

The second detour hardly warrants writing about, but I got some good pictures en-route (including a couple of pictures of signposts just to prove where we'd been)...

I took about 10 pictures, but that one's my favourite (it's also one of the smallest, I took some 1280*960 ones as well).

We arrived at school at about 11, in the end. We signed in, and turned up for maths with half an hour left. It was probably a good idea to see at least a bit of maths, really - we were being given our second piece of coursework.

The rest of the day was pretty normal. Although, instead of going back home, I stayed at school until 6 then went back to Em's. We ate chips on the way back ("the way back" being the back of Liv's car, and "we" being myself, Emily, Liv, and Liv's dad. (And obviously, Liv's dad was in the front of the car, not the back...)).

I woke up this morning feeling sick. This seems to have become something of a habit recently, which is very worrying. I think I might be pregnant.

A Not-So-Smarty Arty "BAH"ty

2006-03-14T21:24:00.000Z

Today has been challenging. If I was a bus driver, I'd proclaim loudly to all my passengers that "ooh, bloody 'ell, it's bin one o' them days". Alas, I'm not, so I won't.

Yesterday saw me paint my canvas black. It came out rather well, and I was filled with a feeling I rarely get when painting (probably because of the fact that I hardly ever do any painting). I think they call it "confidence".

It's worth pointing out that things didn't look good from the start of the art session, for two reasons. First, I went in to school this morning only to be told by my art teacher that I had to incorporate the movement of either sound, living creatures, or water into my project. That was four weeks of work rendered pretty much useless in just under three seconds. I went through my sketchbook and did some stuff on sound, printed off some pictures and even added comments about how I'd build sound into exising pictures. I suppose that'll teach me to read the question properly.

Secondly, I retrieved my canvas at the start of the two-hour exam portion only to find that there was a whopping great big dent right in the middle of it. I'd be lying if I said things were looking good.

Oh, and thirdly, we were visited by a teacher from another school who was "inspecting and offering criticism and advice". There was lots of inspecting, but not much offering of criticism (it was more "your work is shit, you are a failure, will leave school with no GCSEs and are destined to live life sat on a sofa in a council house in Sheffield, eating cold baked beans and wearing a string vest"). I don't think he even knew the meaning of the word "advice". Half way through, he obviously thought it would be hilarious to strike up a conversation with the art technician about cameras, and interrupt a rooms-worth of students to inquire about the Apple Macs. Really, a very funny man. He should be on stage.

Anyway, after the mornings trivalities (namely a bloody hard maths exam), I got down to work on painting a grid onto my blackened, dented canvas.

By 11:15 I was utterly convinced that I was wasting my time. No amount of enthusiastic encouragement from Emily (mmm, alliteration), could snap me out of my frame of mind, and I felt, to say the least, like sticking my foot through the canvas and going to sit in a corner.

A couple of minutes later, it was back to the acrylics tray and the drawer labelled "thick brushes and bits of sponge" to paint over the catastrophy that had appeared on my beautiful black canvas, and appeared to represent a line of well-aimed seagull shit more than it did a grid.

This didn't go too well.

Those of you who know acrylic paint will know that it has a tendency to project itself vertically. Basically, after covering the corner of the canvas I'd just ruined with black paint, I was left with the same load of seagull shit, just a lot blacker.

The solution? Turn the damn thing round.

So, I started work in the opposite corner. My first, "amazing" new idea was to hold two rulers together, with a small gap in the middle to get a perfectly straight line. I hadn't accounted for the canvas' bounciness, so my finger slipped and the "perfectly straight line" was about as straight as a gay banana. I wiped it down, got the black paint out for the second time, and covered it up.

My next "amazing idea" was to draw the lines in with a ruler and pencil then attempt to paint in between the lines. I tried it on a piece of black sugar paper, so it had to work, right? Wrong. Sugar paper is flat. Canvas is bumpy. This meant that I'd be following my pencil guidelines perfectly well, then get to a tiny raised bit on the canvas, and suddenly my line would be missing a huge portion. I tried; oh god how I tried, to get the bloody paintbrush round the other side, but it insisted on splitting into a million individual hairs, leaving me with a line whose edges looked like they had been pebbledashed by our old friends, the seagulls. And yes, I mean pebbledashed with that substance.

Nevertheless, I carried on. Quite why, I have no idea. What I had produced in two hours could have been done in about two seconds flat on a PC, and to a much higher quality, it has to be said. But, I carried on. I carried on, and on. On and on and... you get the idea. I started adding in the "wonky" lines where the "hole" in the middle of the grid was going to be. And then... it was the end of the lesson; lunch. Which meant poor Em had to put up with my stressed-out whining for an hour.

I just about managed to forget about the whole thing during RS and PE; the former of the two saw us writing about different religions' views on the afterlife. Needless to say, rather than be bored shitless, me, Emily and Olivia drew a stickman death picture. PE was, as always, an equally large pile of shite (probably belonging to the same seagulls who shed their load on my canvas). We played "indoor-cricket-with-a-posh-name-that-I-can't-remember". For the first time in my life, (or at the very least, the first time I can remember), I hit the ball properly. It soared through the air majestically, leaving a contrail of tennis-ball dust behind it. It arched magnificently; I watched in awe, dumbstruck by my own sporting achievement. And I continued to watch as someone stepped in the way and caught the bloody thing. Bastard.

After PE, me and Em stayed for art. I did one picture based on sound, then we packed up and went into the common room and listened to Blur. Oh, and I continued to moan about my final piece.

I love school.

A Farty Arty Party

2006-03-13T21:44:00.000Z

Being the indecisive worrier that I am, my art project underwent some, shall we say, "changes" during the course of the last, oooh, 24 hours?

There I was, sat on the sofa, watching Withnail & I (an awesome film, btw) for the third time. Suddenly, for reasons completely unknown to me, the thought struck me: "why the hell was I considering taking my computer in to school?". Plus, I was getting decidedly jealous of everyone getting to throw paint at a canvas when the only throwing I envisioned was that of a monitor. Out of a window. When I got stressed.

So, I said, quite innocently, to my mum, "I want a canvas". She responded with words not unlike the following: "OMFGWTF?!". Actually, thinking about it, it wasn't really that much of an overreaction; I had left it until the night before the first portion of my art exam to realise that I didn't want to do what I'd been telling everyone I wanted to.

I decided that almost a sketchbook's worth of art proclaiming my undying love for all things digital probably wouldn't be considered adequate preparation for a final piece which was going to be done on canvas with acrylic paints, and the only thing vaguely linking it with a computer was the fact that there would be a G5 Mac in the room I was painting in. A rather obvious deduction, really.

So, I broke out the acrylics that Emily bought me, (and that I still haven't paid her back for, having avoided payment thus far via tactful use of the excuse "I thought they were a present"). I also grabbed a case full of Warhammer paints, and four paintbrushes (also given to me by Emily). Once I'd aquired the other required pieces of equipment (namely a water pot, a pallete, and some paper), I set about my next task. Finding somewhere to work.

I chose the kitchen table.

(Just as an aside, it really is awesome how something as boring as where someone decided to do some painting can be turned into an earth-shattering statement simply by giving the words their own line and adding a full stop on the end...)

Anyway, I did a couple of hours work, all the while listening to, amongst other things, "This Is Hardcore" by Pulp. A truly awesome album, if ever there was one, and one that, as soon as Mr. Cocker sang "my name's not Jesus, though I have the same initials", my mum couldn't stop laughing at. Well, ok, she could, but she found that line funny and I thought including a few lyrics would make me look cool.

All of that is irrelevant, though. What matters (well, what did matter, it's been sorted now), was the rather shocking realisation that I didn't actually have/ hadn't arranged to get, a canvas. Luckily, Emily rang and after a five-minute conversation on just how shit maths is, I innocently asked, "can you ask your dad to get me a canvas tomorrow?". At this point I seriously started to doubt my ability as a painter - she responded in much the same way as my mum. My fears were trampled on, however, when Em started saying how glad she was I was doing a painting.

Through some coincidence, it just so happened that Emily had an interview at a school in Sheffield this morning. So, it was decided that she'd go into town and buy me an A2 canvas, then get back to school in time for the start of art. As it happens, she got back in time for maths, a full two hours infront of art.

Canvas situation sorted, I got back to work. Shortly after, I realised that the paintbrushes Em had given me were too big for what I was attempting at the time, and my own ones too, well, shitty. Had I been doing something on the computer, this would have been the moment the monitor got thrown out of the window. In reality, it was paper being thrown across the kitchen, but it's all the same in the end. (Minus the £250 debt).

Arty Farty

2006-03-06T18:23:00.000Z

So, what's this blog about? Art. Art, art, art. I took it as an option for my GCSEs and recently it's been getting a lot more exciting than it used to be; why? I finally managed to "let go" and start using paint for just about everything, and not think about it too much. My chosen topic - movement - allows me to go completely mental; it seems anything with a few clear lines in it can be classes as "movement".

Obviously, being the computer-head that I am, I couldn't stick to good ol' acrylics, so I delved back into some of my old digital art. I dug out a few old things I did when I first got well aquainted with Photoshop, and played about a bit and created two new images. (That's these).

I'm now half(ish) through my sketchbook for my exam preparation, and I've got till the end of the week to finish it. That's not the only problem; I want to do something digital for my final exam piece, but none of the computers at school have PSCS2. That means I'll have to take my tower in, and risk it getting blown up by some crazy PAT-tester. Wonderful...

Ghost Shit

2006-03-03T16:39:00.000Z

About three years ago, my mum's ex-boyfriend acquired, by a method that was legally ambiguous to say the least, a copy of the film "Ghost Ship". If you haven't heard of this film until now, then I apologise sincerely for the reduction in your quality of life. It really is awful.

Anyway, back to 2002, and me, my mum and her boyfriend are sitting down to watch this seemingly awesome new film. The lights are off, we have popcorn and I'm happily eating from a bag of Haribo. The credits finish, and suddenly a load of people are lying onboard a ship's deck with random bits of their bodies missing after being sliced up by a wire that swung from a large pole. With a hundred people dead in a matter of minutes, and me and Lee shouting "awesome" at the TV, my mum decided she'd had enough and turned the TV off. You can imagine my dismay. I can't remember if we watched something else or not - whether we did is entirely insignificant - but fast forward three years and my interest in Ghost Ship had perked up again for reasons not wholly known to me (probably just boredom).

So, last Friday night my mum went out to bingo. I had a rummage through the "film cupboard" and stumbled upon the old DVD. Fantastic, I thought. I stuck it in the computer, got some eatables and sat back to enjoy the gore-fest. I can only say, time does movies bad. The mass death scene wasn't half as entertaining as before. "Meh", I thought, and carried on watching.

The plot goes as follows:

People die on a ship in 1960-something. Fast-forward to present day, and we meet a team of ship salvagers who are towing in a wreck from some ocean somewhere. They finish, and go for a drink. A pilot comes up to them and tells them about a ship he's seen while flying over an ocean. They all investigate it, and it turns out to be the ship that, yes, you guessed, all the people were killed on.
A history lesson ensues, where we find out that only one member of a team of ship salvagers has heard of the Mary Celeste. We're also told that the ship in question (no, I can't remember the name of it), has been floating around in the middle of an ocean for 40 years and despite the massive leaps in technology and air traffic, no one has ever seen it. Now that's what I call a storyline.

They investigate the ship, someone falls through the floor. While rescuing him, the woman in the team sees the ghost of the one survivor of the wire-massacre. It just so happens that every single passenger onboard the Italian superliner was upstairs dancing at the right moment to be cut in half. I see...

Some more stuff happens, the woman tells the pilot she saw a ghost. He says he's experienced the same thing on long flights. Someone makes a witty comment about dragging the boat back. Everyone is happy.

At this point, the lack of anything remotely interesting going on left me with no other option than to close the movie and look for something else to watch. I read somewhere that someone gets hanged in Ghost Ship - evidently another attempt to get people interested in a movie who's defining feature is that fact that some people are chopped in half.

So, I relegated GS to the back of the film cupboard, and got Swordfish instead. Now THAT is a movie.

Hello, hello, and thrice hello.

2006-03-03T16:27:00.000Z

Well, I finally overcame my somewhat paranoid need to host my own, well, everything, and decided to let someone else do the hard work. Obviously, there's a reason for that, and that reason is the impending doom which my own site currently faces, due to that fact that my host needed to spend his money on his personal life, and not waste it away on web-obsessed 15-year-olds. Good on him, I say. My site was about as active as, well, something very inactive, and so, to be perfectly honest, I don't give a monkey's left testicle (not that I have a great supply of monkey testicles, but you get the idea).

I just want to make sure I can download a backup of my ICT coursework... That would be useful.

So, here I am.

I'm not going to ramble in this entry, I'll save that for my next one as, unlike all the other blogs I've had, I'm going to attempt to stick to one subject per entry.